forgiveness

We’ve had days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia of hatred. You can dress it up in whatever disguise you like: religion, nationalism, football teams, whatever, its so damn easy to hate, particularly if you feel you are the victim.

Hate goes down real easy, it feels good, but the hangover hurts like hell. The obvious solution? Hair of the dog – more hate.

Forgiveness? Impossible surely. How can you forgive someone who kills, who hurts, who causes pain to another.

The problem is we just pass the pain on.

That’s when we turn around and say ‘Fuck you, God.’ Usually we follow that up with a prayer.

But in the words of Saint Paul of Tallaght, ‘Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.’ And he does and he has.

… without a thought for tomorrow. We live, breathe, shop, play football, watch football, eat, sleep, make love, with either the faraway concept that one day we die and that is it, or the faraway concept that one day we die and there is so much more.

Each of us has to choose our own ludicrous.

Despair is a process, the eating away of belief in a meta-meaning until all that is left is us as kings and queens of a ruined kingdom of one. Maybe we are right to reject the possibility of life after death because hell, there is no proof! At death, we simply cease to be in the same way as before our birth we did not exist.

Belief and Faith are oft derided concepts, these days. Just because we believe something to be true does not make it so. People talk about the ‘leap of faith.’ But I don’t believe it is a leap; it is more of a step, a decision to set out on the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.

Who knows, we could be wrong. We might fall into a ditch along the way. The people who guide us could be charlatans.

But what is the alternative? A planet of reason consumed by consumerism, a world of warring certainties?

We all feel it, we all enjoy a dose of righteous anger, but where does it lead to? Where is the end of the line? The answer in my experience is that it usually makes the situation worse. Not that I’m any kind of angel. I’m as bad as everyone else.

Anger is step two of the Will to Negation. Step one is isolation, the anxiety of hopelessness. Step three is destruction. The W2N is the antisocial value, anti-hope.

I guess the first step in curing any kind of sickness is the realisation that we are not well. Then we can unblock anger, turn it into something good by doing one of the hardest things in the world.

To forgive someone for something unforgivable, to forgive someone even for something vile and depraved, something the perpetrator might not even want our forgiveness for. It isn’t win-lose. It’s win-win, because anger poisons us inside.